Friday, April 3, 2009

i don't want to gain the whole world and lose my soul

I woke up to this song that was in my head this morning at 400....isn't it weird how the brain works at times.

But then it didn't go away...it was like the annoying toyota commercial save by zero jingle that my son Colin and i would sing all day long this summer.

Back to the point, so I looked up the passage again to take a new look at the context of the verses.

Mark 8:34-36
34Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35For whoever wants to save his lifec]">[c] will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. 36What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? 37Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?

It's easy at times to get so caught up in ourselves, our accomplishments, what we do, produce, invent, create. Instead of giving any pause to the need of giving up what is ours, so we can experience, know, follow God with a surrender we have never had before. It's an easy trap to follow into today.

Practically, one of the best things that can happen today is to look at the things that I own. The places that I invest my time, family, work, relationships, fun. Does it really matter how what I due with my time if my aim..if my objective is only what I get out of it. Giving up whatever is ours, so we can gain Christ has to be the driving force of a journey of following God. Otherwise, it's easy to end up with a compartmentalized faith.

In this verse, verse 37,the question is raised or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?

Augustine defined the soul as "a special substance, endowed with reason, adapted to rule the body". If we give up what matters most to us in our core beliefs, our soul. We begin to give up, our thoughts, convictions and gradually slide toward preferences in the way we follow Christ. We will move further down the road of becoming "men without chests," as C.S. Lewis said in The Abolition of Man.

So I woke up to a tune by Toby Mac and ended up revisiting a fundamental question that Jesus asked his disciples.